Joe Bageant: Anderson Cooper and Class Solidarity

[tom_paine]

SUBTITLE: You cannot man the barricades with a mouthful of Cheetos

Class solidarity was such a good idea. It really was. Obviously, most of the people who need solidarity are in the world's laboring classes. After all, the rich have more than enough solidarity already, as was recently demonstrated by their successful execution of the greatest global financial heist in history. Oh sure, we'll see some state sponsored mock show trials of a few of them -- they always throw a few of their own out of the sleigh to the wolves during their escapes. The big heist was big news. Working Americans will be applying Preparation H to their keisters for a long time to come.

But the ultimate accomplishment of the already rich, the newly rich and the corporate rich, has been their global solidarity on the corporate/financial front. It's been a long run up to globalism, but the rich have great patience. As an American, all my life I've heard their chief mouthpiece, the president of the United States, beginning with Eisenhower, right on up through Kennedy, Reagan, Ford, Carter and Bush, and now Obama, sing the same song. Which goes moreover like this:

"Trade is the road to peace. Commerce and business know no national boundaries. They link nations together on productivity, creating jobs and peace across the world."

It sounded good at the time. Who would have thought that the people enjoying all this harmony and peace brought about through globalization would be enjoying it in a one big happy planetary work gulag? And if they are not doing so at the moment, they will be as soon global capitalism, under the watchful solidarity of the rich, bears full fruit.

more...

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/04/anderson-cooper.html

[skeptical cynic]

1. The pendulum will swing

Once the global working class realizes that nationalism, patriotism and borders are designed to divide them, globalization will result in a global recognition that a peasant is a peasant and a feudal lord is a feudal lord. Cities will burn.

America's workers just need to wake up to the fact that they have more in common with a peasant in Venezuela, Honduras or Ecuador than they have with their own ruling class.

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'

From "The Mask of Anarchy" ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Full poem: http://www.artofeurope.com/shelley/she5.htm